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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Butterflies

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Summer is upon those of us in the northern hemisphere. That invites reflection. In Danish, the word for butterfly is sommerfugl – literally, ‘summer bird’. There is something quietly poetic in that. Then again, the word for butterfly (which is essentially a colourful daylight moth) seems to carry a kind of lyricism in most languages, at least the ones I know: the German is schmetterlinge, the French papillon. Even the sound of the word flutters. Is there anything more aesthetic than a butterfly? I suspect not. And I am not alone.

It is hardly surprising, then, that some of the most sensitive philosophical minds have found solace in this delicate creature. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) for instance observed: “And even to me, who am well-versed in life, butterflies and soap bubbles – and their human counterparts – seem to know the most about happiness” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Two, ‘On Self-Overcoming’).

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is not generally celebrated for his poetic sensibility, though perhaps this is unjust. He remarked in his lecture notes, “When the intellect contemplates nature, it sees only grasses … butterflies” (Lectures on Aesthetics, p.14). One might read this as a reminder that, for Hegel, natural beauty is always fragmentary, while art, being a product of spirit, achieves a higher unity. Or perhaps he was simply pausing, momentarily, to notice the butterflies.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1973) was more explicitly lyrical. Reflecting on Adolf Portmann’s The Beauty of Butterflies (1951), she wrote in her diary: “Everything that is appears; everything that appears disappears; everything that is alive has an urge to appear; this urge is called vanity; since there is no urge to disappear and disappearance is the law of appearance, the urge, called vanity, is in vain. Vanitas vanitatum vanitas – all is vanity, all is in vain” (Denktagebuch 796). Butterflies, for Arendt, become a meditation on appearance and transience; on the fleeting insistence of life on being seen.

And then there are the actual poets. Novalis (1772-1801) captured something ineffable when he wrote, “If you can hear the laugh of butterflies, you know the taste of the clouds.” Closer to home, Robert Graves (1895-1985) found in the butterfly’s erratic flight a kind of perfect imperfection:

“Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight…
A just sense of how not to fly.”
(Flying Crooked)

There is, perhaps, something philosophical in that poem, too: an acceptance that beauty lies not in precision, but in deviation – in the crooked, hopeful, and faintly absurd trajectory of things.

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is now available in Spanish as Grandes Mentes Y Pequeñas Cosas.